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The Planes of Existence
While the people of Materia live their lives in the everyday world, there are many stories and tales regarding the worlds beyond death: the places where spirits walk, and where angels and devils live. These other planes of existence are regarded as a myth to some and a reality to others. Knowledge concerning the planes differs from society to society, and is tightly tied to the religious beliefs of the area. Interestingly enough, there appears to be consistency between the different tales. Four planes are inevitably described: a material plane where mortals live, a spiritual plane that mimics the mortal one, a heavenly plane where goodness and peace prevails, and a hellish plane where evil and conflict are supreme. Those with powerful magical abilities can harness spells that allow living mortals to travel to different planes, and locations are said to exist where the planes naturally converge, allowing denizens to find their ways across easily, if not mistakenly. There are also those who can summon beings from beyond, reaffirming the existence of worlds beyond the human one. The Inner Planes: Materia and Etheria The Material Plane, Materia, is the physical realm of order. The sentient denizens of this plane are called mortals, and it is ruled by laws of nature, physics, and arcana. These concepts are significantly more stringent than in any other plane; things such as time and cause-and-effect are seen as mutable, imprecise phenomena in other planes. As a result, Materia inflicts its laws upon extraplanar visitors, much to their discomfort and inconvenience, and mortals are hard-pressed to survive outside in the worlds that have no reason to support their rigid, inflexible bodies. Materia's tightly-bound counterpart is the Ethereal Plane, Etheria, also often known as the Spirit Realm. It is a more chaotic, unstructured world that often echoes the places and creatures of the Material Plane. Etheria's sentient denizens are called the fey. Creatures here tend to be ruled much more by emotion than logic or physical needs, and the same can even be said for events and natural phenomenon. Feywilds Under the correct conditions or with certain magics, it is possible to view and influence either Materia or Etheria from their counterpart plane. Further, there are numerous places where the two planes seem to converge entirely, showing traits from both planes simultaneously; these places are called feywilds in Materia and harshlands in Etheria. Who lives and rules these areas primarily dictates whether they will be more hospitable to chaos or law, but in either case, only "strange" mortals and fey tend to find them anything more than unsettling, jarring places. The Outer Planes: Heaven and Hell The Outer Planes, unlike the Material or Ethereal Planes, are truly infinite and timeless. Heaven, the realm of positive energy, is a place where goodness and peace are inherent and supreme. Its primary denizens are the angels. The realm of negative energy, Hell, is Heaven's opposite: it is a bastion of evil and conflict, and its primary denizens are the devils. The pair of them, having little to no bearing on either the Inner Planes or each other, are referred to as the Outer Planes. There are two places where these two planes are said to connect: Pandemonium, where angels gather in Hell, and Purgatory, where devils gather in Heaven. The Center of the Multiverse: Allspace There is a fifth plane of which little to nothing is known in Materia. It is called Allspace, from where hail the All. All believes that it is the progenitor of all multiverses, albeit mostly by accident, and there is actually little evidence that this is not the case. The Space Between: The Astral Plane Between the planes is what is known as the Astral Plane: a vague, vast and empty space between dimensions. Man-made pocket dimensions including Materian ascendant echoes, magical extradimensional spaces used by Bags of Holding and other spells, and teleportation travel all utilize the Astral Plane. Nothing native is believed to exist in Astral space. Category:Religion Category:Culture